The present disclosure relates to an electronic enclosure or encasement advantageously configured for an incubator or similar device, where excessive noise may be an issue. In particular, the present disclosure relates to an electronic enclosure including active noise control, and communication.
In U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/952,250, referenced above and assigned to the assignee of the present application, techniques were disclosed for abating noise, such as snoring, in the vicinity of a human head by utilizing Adaptive Noise Control (ANC). More specifically, utilizing a multiple-channel feed-forward ANC system using adaptive FIR filters with an 1×2×2 FXLMS algorithm, a noise suppression system may be particularly effective at reducing snoring noises. While noise suppression is desirous for adult humans, special requirements may be needed in the cases of babies, infants, and other life forms that may have sensitivity to noise.
Newborn babies, and particularly premature, ill, and low birth weight infants are often placed in special units, such as neonatal intensive care units (NICUs) where they require specific environments for medical attention. Devices such as incubators have greatly increased the survival of very low birth weight and premature infants. However, high levels of noise in the NICU have been shown to result in numerous adverse health effects, including hearing loss, sleep disturbance and other forms of stress. At the same time, an important relationship during infancy is the attachment or bonding to a caregiver, such as a mother and/or father. This is due to the fact that this relationship may determine the biological and emotional ‘template’ for future relationships and well-being. It is generally known that healthy attachment to the caregiver through bonding experiences during infancy may provide a foundation for future healthy relationships. However, infants admitted to an NICU may lose such experiences in their earliest life due to limited interaction their parents due to noise and/or means of communication. Therefore, it is important to reduce noise levels inside incubators and increase bonding opportunities for NICU babies and their parents. In addition, there are advantages for newborns inside the incubators to hear their mothers' voice which can help release the stress and improve language development. Communicating with NICU babies can also benefit the new mothers, such as, preventing postpartum depression, improving bonding, and the like.
Regarding communication, it would be advantageous to provide “cues” to a caregiver based on an infant's cry, so that the infant may be understood, albeit on a rudimentary level. These cues may be advantageous for interpreting a likely condition of the infant via its vocal communication. Unlike adults, the airways of newborn infants are quite different from those of adults. The larynx in newborn infants is positioned close to the base of the skull. The high position of the larynx in the newborn is similar to its position in other animals and allows the newborn human to form a sealed airway from the nose to the lungs. The soft palate and epiglottis provide a “double seal,” and liquids can flow around the relatively small larynx into the esophagus while air moves through the nose, through the larynx and trachea into the lungs. The anatomy of the upper airways in newborn infants is “matched” to a neural control system (newborn infants are obligated nose breathers). They normally will not breathe through their mouths even in instances where their noses may be blocked. The unique configuration of the vocal tract is the reason for the extremely nasalized cry of the infant.
From one perspective, the increasing alertness and decreasing crying as part of the sleep/wakefulness cycle suggests that there may be a balanced exchange between crying and attention. The change from sleep/cry to sleep/alert/cry necessitates the development of control mechanisms to modulate arousal. The infant must increase arousal more gradually, in smaller increments, to maintain states of attention for longer periods. Crying is a heightened state of arousal produced by nervous system excitation triggered by some form of perceived threat, such as hunger, pain, or sickness, or individual differences in thresholds for stimulation. Crying is modulated and developmentally facilitated by control mechanisms to enable the infant to maintain non-crying states.
The cry serves as the primary means of communication for infants. While it is possible for experts (experienced parents and child care specialists) to distinguish infant cries though training and experience, it is difficult for new parents and for inexperienced child care workers to interpret infant cries. Accordingly, techniques are needed to extract audio features from the infant cry so that different communicated states for an infant may be determined. Cry Translator™, a commercially available product known in the art, claims to be able to identify five distinct cries: hunger, sleep, discomfort, stress and boredom. An exemplary description of the product may be found in US Pat. Pub. No. 2008/0284409, titled “Signal Recognition Method With a Low-Cost Microcontroller,” which is incorporated by reference herein. However, such configurations are less robust, provide limited information, are not necessarily suitable for NICU applications, and do not provide integrated noise reduction.
Accordingly, there is a need for infant voice analysis, as well as a need to couple voice analysis with noise reduction. Using an infant's cry as a diagnostic tool may play an important role in determining infant voice communication, and for determining emotional, pathological and even medical conditions, such as SIDS, problems in developmental outcome and colic, medical problems in which early detection is currently possible only by invasive procedures such as chromosomal analysis and other diagnostic methods. Additionally, related techniques are needed for analyzing medical problems which may be readily identified, but would benefit from an improved ability to define prognosis (e.g., prognosis of long term developmental outcome in cases of prematurity and drug exposure).